Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof; Sheryl WuDunn

  "I have been a bad cop," he said. "To bad people, yes, but I was bad. One day I was thinking, in my life, have I ever done anything good? Well, now I have a chance from God to do something good. She is helping people, and I must help Mukhtaran Bibi. I must do something good. That is why in spite of every danger to my life, to my career, I support Mukhtaran Bibi."

  Farooq said that his personnel reviews were now highly negative, and that his police career was effectively over. He feared that he could be murdered. But through watching Mukhtar, he had found a new purpose in life: protecting and speaking up for impoverished women in the villages.

  After the Musharraf government collapsed in 2008, a cloud lifted from Mukhtar's operations. The intelligence agencies began to spy on terrorists instead of on Mukhtar. Pakistani spies no longer tailed us when Mukhtar showed us around the nearby villages. The government stopped harassing her, and the dangers eased just a little, allowing Mukhtar to step up her activities. In 2009, Mukhtar married a policeman who had long pleaded for her hand. She became his second wife, making Mukhtar an odd emblem of women's rights, but the marriage proceeded only after the first wife convinced Mukhtar that this was what she genuinely wanted. It was another unusual chapter in an unusual life. This uneducated woman from a tiny village had stood up to her country's president and army chief, and after years of enduring unremitting threats and harassment, she had outlasted him. She had taken a sordid tale of victimization and--through her extraordinary courage and vision--become an inspiration to us all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Shame of "Honor"

  If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, "I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity," then the girl's father and mother ... shall display the cloth [that the couple slept on] before the elders of the town.... If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death.

  --DEUTERONOMY 22:13-21

  Of all the things that people do in the name of God, killing a girl because she doesn't bleed on her wedding night is among the most cruel. Yet the hymen--fragile, rarely seen, and pretty pointless--remains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world, the simulacrum of honor. No matter how much gold may sell for, a hymen is infinitely more valuable. It is frequently worth more than a human life.

  The cult of virginity has been exceptionally widespread. Not only does the Bible advocate stoning girls to death when they fail to bleed on their wedding sheets, but Solon, the great lawgiver of ancient Athens, prescribed that no Athenian could be sold into slavery save a woman who lost her virginity before marriage. In China, a neo-Confucian saying from the Song Dynasty declares: "For a woman to starve to death is a small matter, but for her to lose her chastity is a calamity."

  This harsh view has dissipated in most of the world, but survives in the Middle East, and this emphasis on sexual honor is today a major reason for violence against women. Sometimes it takes the form of rape, because--as with Mukhtar--often the simplest way to punish a rival family is to violate the daughter. Sometimes it takes the form of honor killing, in which a family kills one of its own girls because she has behaved immodestly or has fallen in love with a man (often there is no proof that they have had sex, and autopsies of victims of honor killings frequently reveal the hymen to be intact). The paradox of honor killings is that societies with the most rigid moral codes end up sanctioning behavior that is supremely immoral: murder.

  Du'a Aswad was a beautiful Kurdish girl living in northern Iraq. She was seventeen years old when she fell in love with a Sunni Arab boy. One night she stayed out with him. Nobody knows if they actually slept together, but her family assumed that they had. When Du'a returned the next morning, she saw the rage in her family and ran to seek shelter in the home of a tribal elder, but religious leaders and her own family members insisted that she must die. So eight men stormed the elder's house and dragged her out into the street, as a large crowd gathered around her.

  Honor killings are illegal in Iraqi Kurdistan, but security forces were present as Du'a was attacked, and they did not interfere. At least one thousand men joined in the assault. So many men in the crowd shot video clips with their cell phones that on the Web you can find a half-dozen versions of what happened next.

  Du'a was thrown to the ground, and her black skirt was ripped off to humiliate her. Her long, thick hair cascaded around her shoulders. She tried to get up, but the men kicked her around as if she were a soccer ball. Frantic, she tried to fend off the blows, to get up, to cover herself, to find a sympathetic face in the crowd. Then the men gathered rocks and concrete blocks and dropped them on her. Most rolled off, but she began bleeding. Some of the rocks struck her head. It took thirty minutes for Du'a to die.

  When she was dead and could no longer feel shame, some men in the crowd covered her legs and bottom again. This seemed to be meant as a sanctimonious gesture of righteousness, as if the obscenity were a teenage girl's bare flesh rather than her bleeding corpse.

  The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world (Pakistan's government uncovered 1,261 honor killings in 2003 alone). But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides. Our estimate is that at least 6,000, and probably far more, honor killings take place annually around the world.

  In any case, that figure doesn't begin to capture the scope of the problem, because it doesn't include what might be called honor rapes--those rapes intended to disgrace the victim or demean her clan. In recent genocides, rape has been used systematically to terrorize certain ethnic groups. Mass rape is as effective as slaughtering people, yet it doesn't leave corpses that lead to human rights prosecutions. And rape tends to undermine the victim groups' tribal structures, because leaders lose authority when they can't protect the women. In short, rape becomes a tool of war in conservative societies precisely because female sexuality is so sacred. Codes of sexual honor, in which women are valued based on their chastity, ostensibly protect women, but in fact they create an environment in which women are systematically dishonored.

  In Darfur, it gradually became clear that the Sudanese-sponsored Janjaweed militias were seeking out and gang-raping women of three African tribes, then cutting off their ears or otherwise mutilating them to mark them forever as rape victims. To prevent the outside world from knowing, the Sudanese government punished women who reported rapes or sought medical treatment. When one student, Hawa, was gang-raped and beaten by the Janjaweed outside Kalma camp, her friends carried her to a clinic run by Doctors of the World, an aid group. Two French nurses immediately began caring for her injuries, but several truckloads of police stormed the clinic, pushed aside the French nurses who tried valiantly to resist, and burst in on Hawa. They dragged her out of the clinic and carried her off to prison, where she was chained to a cot by an arm and a leg.

  The crime? Fornication, for by seeking treatment she was acknowledging that she had engaged in sex before marriage, and she did not provide the mandatory four adult male Muslim eyewitnesses to prove that it was rape. Sudan also blocked aid groups from bringing into Darfur postexposure prophylaxis kits, which can greatly reduce the risk that a rape victim will be infected with HIV.

  Mass rapes have been reported at stunning levels in recent conflicts. Half of the women in Sierra Leone endured sexual violence or the threat of it during the upheavals in that country, and a United Nations report claims that 90 percent of girls and women over the age of three were sexually abused in parts of Liberia during civil war there. Even in places like Pakistan, where there is no genocide or all-out war, honor rapes arise from an obsession with virginity and from the authorities' indifference to injustices suffered by the poor and uneducated. Shershah Syed, a prominent gyne
cologist in Karachi, says that he frequently treats young girls from the slums after rapes. And then, unless the girl kills herself, the family has to move away; otherwise, the perpetrators--who are usually rich and well connected--will terrorize the family and eliminate them as witnesses. And the police are worse than indifferent.

  "When I treat rape victims, I tell the girls not to go to the police," Dr. Syed added. "Because if a girl goes to the police, the police will rape her."

  The world capital of rape is the eastern Congo. Militias consider it risky to engage in firefights with other gunmen, so instead they assault civilians. They discovered that the most cost-effective way to terrorize civilian populations is to conduct rapes of stunning brutality. Frequently the Congolese militias rape women with sticks or knives or bayonets, or else they fire their guns into the women's vaginas. In one instance, soldiers raped a three-year-old girl and then fired their guns into her. When surgeons saw her, there was no tissue left to repair. The little girl's grief-stricken father then committed suicide.

  "All militias here rape women, to show their strength and to show your weakness," said Julienne Chakupewa, a rape counselor in Goma, Congo. "In other places, there is rape because the soldiers want a woman. Here, it's that but also a viciousness, a mentality of hatred, and it's women who pay the price.

  "We say 'women,'" Julienne added quickly, "but these victims are not adults. They are girls of fourteen, even children of six."

  In 2008, the United Nations formally declared rape a "weapon of war," and Congo came up constantly in the discussions. Major General Patrick Cammaert, a former United Nations force commander, spoke of the spread of rape as a war tactic and said something haunting: "It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict."

  One of those Congolese victims is Dina, a seventeen-year-old from the town of Kindu. She wore a blue shirt and bright multicolored skirt as she told us her story, an orange head scarf fastened demurely over her head. Dina was shy, speaking softly through an interpreter, and she smiled often in nervousness.

  One of six children, Dina grew up working on her parents' farm, growing bananas, cassava, and beans. Two of her brothers attended school for a bit, but none of the daughters did. "It's more important to educate boys," she explained, and she seemed to believe it.

  All the local residents knew that there were soldiers from the Hutu Interahamwe militia in the area, so Dina was fearful whenever she went out to farm the crops. But the alternative was to starve. One day, because of the danger, Dina cut short her work in her bean field and headed back to town well before sunset. As she was walking home, five Hutu militia members surrounded her. They had guns and knives and forced her to the ground. One of them was carrying a stick.

  "If you cry out, we will kill you," one of them told Dina. So she kept quiet as, one by one, the five men raped her. Then they held her down as one of them shoved the stick inside her.

  When Dina didn't come home, her father and friends bravely went out to the fields, and there they found her, half dead in the grass. They covered her and carried her back to her home. There was a health center in Kindu, but Dina's family couldn't afford to take her there to be treated, so she was cared for only at home. She lay paralyzed in her bed, unable to walk. The stick had broken into her bladder and rectum, causing a fistula, or hole, in the tissues. As a result, urine and feces trickled constantly through her vagina and down her legs. These injuries, rectovaginal and vesicovaginal fistulas, are common in Congo because of sexual violence.

  "My people had no tribal conflict with them," Dina said of the soldiers. "Their only purpose was to rape me and leave me bleeding and leaking wastes." This culture of brutality spread from militia to militia, from tribe to tribe. In just the Congolese province of South Kivu, the UN estimates that there were twenty-seven thousand sexual assaults in 2006. By another UN accounting, three quarters of the women in some areas had been raped. John Holmes, the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, says flatly: "The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world."

  One of the warlords whose troops have been implicated in the rapes is Laurent Nkunda, a tall, genial man who served us dinner in his comfortable mountain lair. He passes himself off as a Pentecostal pastor and piously wore a REBELS FOR CHRIST button on his uniform, apparently because he thought it would win him American support. Before he offered us drinks and snacks, he said grace. Nkunda insisted that his troops never rape anybody, adding that the only time one of his soldiers did rape a woman, he executed the soldier. Yet everyone knows that rape is routine. When Nkunda presented some of the prisoners of war whom his soldiers had seized from rival armed militias, we asked them about rape.

  Noel Rwabirinba, a child soldier in Congo, said that it is the troops' right to rape women. (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  "If we see girls, it's our right," said one, Noel Rwabirinba, a sixteen-year-old who said he had carried a gun for two years. "We can violate them."

  United Nations peacekeepers did little to stop the rapes. Former ambassador Stephen Lewis of Canada, one of the most eloquent advocates for the world's women, has suggested that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should make mass rape a priority and pledge to resign if member countries don't support him. "We're talking about more than fifty percent of the world's population, amongst whom are the most uprooted, disinherited and impoverished of the earth," Lewis said. "If you can't stand up for the women of the world, then you shouldn't be Secretary-General."

  Women have suffered grievously in the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur. Men, too. In Rwanda, when the genocide was over, 70 percent of the country's population was female because so many more men were killed. In Darfur, after interviewing several women who told of having been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question: "If women are raped when they get firewood, then why don't they stay in the camp? Why don't the men collect firewood?"

  "When men leave the camp, they're shot dead," one of the women explained patiently. "When the women leave, they're only raped." In almost every conflict, mortality is disproportionately male. But whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war--meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population. To travel in eastern Congo and talk to villagers is to uncover layers and layers of routinized rape. In a camp for displaced people, we asked to speak to a rape victim, and one was immediately brought over. To ensure her privacy, we took her under a tree away from other people, but after ten minutes a long line of women formed nearby.

  "What are you all doing here?" we asked.

  "We're all rape victims," explained the woman in front. "We're waiting to tell our stories, too."

  For Dina, lying incontinent and paralyzed in her home, life seemed to be over. Then neighbors began telling her family about a hospital where doctors could fix injuries like hers. The hospital is called HEAL Africa, and it is located in Goma, the biggest city in eastern Congo. The family contacted HEAL Africa's representative, and he arranged for a missionary plane to carry Dina to Goma for treatment. HEAL Africa covered the expense.

  Dina was taken from the Goma airstrip by ambulance to the HEAL Africa hospital; it was the first time she had ever ridden in a car. Nurses gave her a plastic diaper and put her together with dozens of other women, all of whom were incontinent because of fistulas. This gave Dina the courage to try to stand and walk. The nurses gave her a crutch and helped her hobble about. They fed her and began a course of physical therapy, and added her name to a list of women waiting for fistula surgery. When Dina's day came, a doctor successfully sewed up her rectovaginal fistula. Then she underwent more physical therapy as she prepared for a second operation to repair the hole in her bladder. Meanwhile, Dina began to wonder what she would do postsurgery, and she decided to stay for the time being in Goma.

  "If I return to Kindu," she explained, "I'll just be raped again." Yet after the second surgery, which also succeeded, Dina decided to go back to Kindu
after all. She missed her family, and in any case the war was also reaching into Goma. It seemed to Dina that she might be just as vulnerable if she stayed, so she chose to return to the maelstrom of Kindu.

  "Study Abroad"--in the Congo

  In the cauldron of violence and misogyny that is eastern Congo, the HEAL Africa hospital where Dina was treated is a sanctuary of dignity. It is a large compound of low white buildings where patients are respected. It's an example of an aid project that makes an extraordinary difference in people's lives. And one of those helping patients like Dina is a young American woman named Harper McConnell.

  Harper has long, dirty-blond hair and very white skin that seems to redden more than tan under the tropical sun. She dresses casually, and with the exception of African necklaces dangling on her collar, she looks as if she could be on an American university campus. Yet here she is in war-torn Congo, speaking excellent Swahili and bantering with her new friends who grew up in the Congolese bush. She has taken a path that more young Americans should consider--traveling to the developing world to "give back" to people who desperately need the assistance.

  Young people often ask us how they can help address issues like sex trafficking or international poverty. Our first recommendation to them is to get out and see the world. If you can't do that, it's great to raise money or attention at home. But to tackle an issue effectively, you need to understand it--and it's impossible to understand an issue by simply reading about it. You need to see it firsthand, even live in its midst.

  One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a "gap year" or by studying abroad. If more Americans worked for a summer teaching English at a school like Mukhtar's in Pakistan, or working at a hospital like HEAL Africa in Congo, our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans.